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By the time of Pearl Harbor, when Bobby was sixteen, Joe, Sr., who had supported Neville Chamberlain's pol- icy of appeasing the Nazis, had been forced out as President Roosevelt's Am- bassador to Britain and had transferred his ambitions to his sons. The eldest, the gregarious Joe, Jr., was the one desig- nated for politics, although Jack had already made a down payment on the family's political rehabilitation: at twenty- three, he was famous as the author of an implicitly pro-intervention tract, "Why England Slept," his Harvard senior the- sis turned (with the help of Arthur Krock, of the Times) best-selling book. By 1946, Jack was more famous still; his PT-109 exploits had been chronicled by John Hersey in this magazine, and he was running for Congress. Joe, Jr., was dead. He had volunteered to fly a .I bomber full of high explosives on a one- way trip to a German rocket base on the French coast; he was supposed to bail out before impact, but his plane ex- ploded shortly after takeoff. He had died in the service not only of his coun- try but also of his father's harsh ethic: he was trying at once to vindicate the fam- ily and to outdo Jack within it. Bobby, for his part, had joined the Navy in 1943, just after his eighteenth birth- day, and combined officer training with studies at Harvard. But he washed out of flight school as the war was ending, and it was over by the time he went on active duty-as an enlisted man aboard a destroyer named for his dead brother. Jack and Bobby could hardly have been more different. Jack dealt with the pressures of being a son of Joseph Ken- nedy by keeping the patriarch at arm's length; Bobby did so by trying to please him. Jack's strategy was ironic detach- ment; Bobby's was humorless loyalty. Jack's Catþolicism was nominal, Bob- by's fervent. Jack was the clan's prince, Bobby its foot soldier. The differences showed in, among other ways, their re- I lations with women-a topic on which, unsurprisingly, Thomas is franker than Schlesinger. Thomas writes that, ac- cording to Lem Billings, Jack's room- mate from Choate, the two brothers lost their virginity, years apart, at the same Harlem whorehouse; Billings ac- companied Bobby to the establishment, paid the bill, and was reimbursed by Joe, Sr. But there were few other paral- lels. Jack was elusive, glamorous, re- laxed; he had many liaisons, often si- multaneously. Bobby was bashful, at once tense and intense, a little priggish. Bobby's "first true love," a Lauren Bacall look-alike named K.K. Hannon, told Thomas many years later that Bobby had been "wry and very dear. He was interested in everything, curious. He didn't have good manners, but he tried. He was like a ten-year-old in a grown- up's suit." Bobby asked her to marry him; she gently put him of( Some time later, as the two walked down a Boston street on the way to the movies, they ran into Jack, who took one look at K.K. and invited himself along. "The next morning," K.K. told Thomas, "Jack called up. I thought he was ter- rific. That was the end of Bobby. It was very awkward." Bobby showed no anger at this exercise of droit du seigneur. He simply deferred. Thomas tells of another failed ro- mance, one that occurred in the spring of 1948, while Bobby was touring Eu- rope alone before starting law school at the University of Virginia. KatWeen- the most beautiful, spirited, and inde- pendent of the Kennedy girls, who went by the marvellous nickname of Kick, and whose husband, an English aris- tocrat, had died in the war-had just been killed in a plane crash. Thomas writes: In deep mourning, Kennedy wandered on to London, where he gloomily attended a popular play called "The Chiltern Hun- dreds." The play was based partly on the much-publicized drama of Kathleen's mar-